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Apply Yourself

I remember attending an information session at the Illini Center about a year ago. There was a phrase that I heard consistently from the faculty, professors and current/former students – “You will apply what you learn over the weekends on Mondays”. While that’s certainly been true for me so far, last week was different…

So, I recently assumed a new role with additional responsibilities that are new to me; namely product portfolio management. That means that I have P&L accountability, which includes model governance. I have a marketing background, so I’m used to working with predictive models, but I’ve never had to work with modelers directly.

Having recently finished Stats, I was feeling a little confident going into my meeting. It was partly because when I think of modelers, I envision these guys. In reality, as highly intelligent, analytical subject matter experts in their respective fields, they actually looked more like this.

They hit me with assumptions and correlations; I countered with coefficients, Y-intercepts and R-squareds. Then they broke out the big guns – what the heck is the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test??? Curse you, Gini coefficient!!!

I left the meeting kind of feeling like this guy. That said, I was able to hold my own in a setting that would have been pretty intimidating eight months ago. Keep applying yourself, my friends!